Internet law: a good bad example of Russia's backsliding

Russia's State Duma has passed a number of new laws in the
past week, all seemingly aimed at reining in civil society and criticism of
public figures. The bills would re-criminalize defamation and impose limits and
labels on NGOs. They follow the introduction last month of excessive fines for
unauthorized protests.

One of this week's bills, Duma Bill
89417 is a proposed Internet statute that, among other provisions, would create
a blacklist of websites that all Russians Internet service providers (ISPs)
would have to block and refuse to host. The bill was hurried through the
legislature in one week. (The defamation bill was approved today in the Duma's
third and final reading; jail terms were eliminated from an earlier draft, but
fines were allowed reaching as high as 5 million rubles or about US$153,000, news
reports said.) Both bills now await President Vladimir Putin's signature.

Bill 89417 demonstrates everything that is wrong with this
flurry of new legislation. Rather than fixing old legal problems, as the
government claims, it exacerbates them, and to the extent it mirrors other
countries' laws, it demonstrates just how much Russia is diverging from
accepted international norms of human rights.

The new law ostensibly fixes flaws in a previous media
regulation bill. At the very end of 2010, the Duma passed Law 436-FZ, which required all "information
products," including Internet hosted material, deemed unsuitable for children
to be marked with visible warnings. The law was due to take effect on September
1, 2012.

Internet technologists had warned
that 436-FZ was too broad, and would require individual comments and home pages
to be marked with age-appropriate ratings in the style of American movies. The
new law supposedly corrects this. It amends the law to exclude the majority of Internet
content, although still requires "online publications" to give ratings. The
term is ambiguous, but apparently includes online news services.

The amendments also include the creation of a centralized
blacklist of websites. After criticism from, among others, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, the
criteria for being included on the blacklist has been narrowed--it now is
specifically tied to child-safety related content, including child pornography,
material encouraging drug use, and suicide advice. Which sites should be placed
on the blacklist, however, is to be solely determined by a new Russian agency,
with no further oversight. Under a separate exemption, the Russian courts can place
sites on the registry without limit, provided their content is "banned in the
Russian media."

As with its predecessor, the new bill creates more questions
and opens more loopholes than it addresses. Will the blacklist be secret? If
so, how will websites be able to appeal being included (which, according to the
law, they are only permitted to do for three months after introduction)? If
websites do not appeal within the three-month timeframe, will they remain on
the blacklist permanently? Will sites that do not contain age ratings be
subject to bans by the courts? Will that include foreign news sites that may be
unaware or unwilling to comply with Russian labeling requirements? Will a
single page be sufficient to ban an entire site or IP address? How will sites
be reported? Will it be possible to trigger a ban by maliciously injecting
prohibited content into vulnerable sites? If such content is removed, will the
ban remain?

If Russia's lawmakers are seeking to imitate other country's
laws in the area of child protection, they have failed to learn key lessons.
Russia's version of Wikipedia was one of the largest sites to protest the new law,
as well it might. A similar, albeit voluntary, blacklist in the U.K. led the
U.S. version of Wikpedia to be blocked by some ISPs in that country following
the reporting of a single Wikipedia-hosted image. In the United States, the
1996 Communication Decency Act included provisions that would criminalize the
distribution of obscene content to children, but these were overturned
by the U.S. courts as creating unconstitutional limits on Internet
expression.

Russia's compulsory prohibitions suffer from many of the
same potential problems as the current U.K. system--enforced secrecy, arbitrary
blocks, technical challenges, and a limited effect on the actual issue of child
pornography. It carries with it the same wider impact on Internet expression
that may be child-unfriendly, but is vital to an open society--including the
free reporting of adult matters. Add to that the dangers of handing such power
to censor the Net to a centralized and unaccountable government agency, allied
with an administration increasingly unfriendly to dissent, and you are left
with a law that will do little good, and probably much harm.

Politicians like Medvedev have pointed to its uncensored Internet as proof their
country respects a free press. That Russia will so quickly abandon that
standard shows how fragile its respect can be.

San Francisco-based CPJ Internet Advocacy Coordinator Danny O’Brien has worked globally as a journalist and activist covering technology and digital rights. Follow him on Twitter @danny_at_cpj.

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